Women Confront Confederate Forces in North Carolina

The full title of this essay, which will appear in my next book, The Long Shadow of the Civil War, is “Occupied At Home: Women Confront Confederate Forces in North Carolina’s Quaker Belt.”

This history of North Carolina’s Randolph County area will certainly remind folks that the Free State of Jones was only one of many hotbeds of Southern Unionism during the Civil War. For several reasons, even fiercer inner civil wars occurred in NC than in Mississippi. For one, NC had fewer large slaveholders and more nonslaveholders than Mississippi; also, many more Confederate forces swept through the NC Piedmont on the hunt for deserters than through the Piney Woods of Mississippi.

Another difference between this inner civil war and that of Jones County, MS, was the presence of a small but devout Wesleyan Methodist community that opposed slavery as well as secession. Perhaps that is why women are particularly visible in the Randolph County area uprising–they shared their menfolk’s religious as well as political views.

If you read my “Renegade Women” post, you might remember Martha Sheets of North Carolina, who was arrested for threatening Sheriff Aaron Sanders with a visit from deserters if he did not provide corn for the starving women of her neighborhood. “You have told lies to get your sons out of this war,” she told the sheriff, “and you don’t care for the rest that is gone, nor for their families. . . . If you don’t bring that grain to my door you will suffer, and that bad” (spelling corrected).

Martha didn’t mince words.

In this essay, you will hear the voices of Martha Sheets and many other Unionist women from North Carolina.

NOTE: In addition to appearing in Long Shadow of the Civil War, this essay appears in the anthology Occupied Women, edited by LeeAnn Whites and Alecia Long, LSU Press, 2009.